The Garden Harvest: 7/11/25
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
Welcome back to the Garden Harvest.
Each week, we gather and curate the freshest insights from the worlds of Creators and Legacy Media, so you can stay rooted in what matters and spot new opportunities where others can’t.
Let’s get into it…
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Short form is coming for TV
Instagram and TikTok are both building TV-native apps to bring their short form content to your TV.
Honestly? It was just a matter of time. YouTube set the precedent here by proving that short form video can thrive beyond the smartphone (see: any recent Nielsen chart).
The formatting questions, such as how the translation of vertical videos to horizontal screens will work, are interesting. But the deeper question is more existential in nature: what is TV becoming? YouTube is one thing, but what happens when every social platform migrates to the living room?
For creators, this opens doors to bigger ad dollars and longer-form storytelling, but perhaps most notably: the legitimacy that comes with landing on the same real estate as Hollywood streamers.
And for legacy media, it’s all but another clear sign that creator content is no longer the “other.”
A legacy company that gets it
British media firm Channel4 just launched a new comedy YouTube channel, which will publish weekly long-form programming, plus content on TikTok and Instagram. To start, the line-up is a cast of seven up-and-coming comics who have emerged from YouTube and the UK stand-up circuit.
It’s always great to see a traditional company embrace the creator economy with the right mindset. And the formula really wasn’t that complicated for them: they recognized that audiences are digital-first, acknowledged that creators are already building multi-million dollar businesses, and then met them where they were. Channel 4, unlike other legacy businesses, didn’t try to drag creators into old formats, but rather built something new around them.
The best part? It’s working really well. In less than three years, their YouTube channels have amassed 2.5 million subscribers and more than one billion views, with 85% of the audience under the age of 34.
This line from Sacha Khari, Channel 4’s Head of Digital Commissioning, sums it up quite well: “They have really leaned in to the importance of socials and understand that social isn’t an enemy but can help and give us the opportunity to talk directly to our audience.”
We should all take notes.
What a great YouTube show can look like
Earlier this week, Substacker-in-chief Ben Odell broke down how to finance a YouTube show (check it out here if you missed it). Today, we want to follow that up, not with a business case, but with a creative one. Because sometimes, the best way to understand what’s possible is to see it for yourself.
Enter Shanked — a rowdy, creator-led comedy that assembles some of the internet’s biggest creators and comedians into the world of country clubs. Created by Laura Clery, Mitsy Sanderson, and Aristotle Georgeson (aka Blake Webber), and directed by Christian Breslauer (Cannes Lions and VMA winner) alongside Workaholics alum Adam Newacheck, the show follows the chaos of the fictional Cedar Oaks Country Club—C.O.C.C., for short. It’s The Office meets Caddyshack, and it works.
The backers are London Alley and Vice Media Group. And the style is, well, different from what you’d expect from a traditional streamer. It’s big personalities, fast comedy, and a show that’s designed to be shared.
Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments.
GARDEN VIEW
If your feed has been flooded with videos of Indonesian boat racing lately, you’re not alone. And if you haven’t seen them yet, congrats, you’re about to discover one of the most effortlessly cool viral moments of the year.
But there’s a real lesson here, and it’s about “aura farming.”
It’s a concept that Reed Duchscher has been discussing with his team. See his post here. At first, it’s easy to dismiss this as throwaway Gen-Z/Alpha term, but it’s actually a sharp framework for understanding how creators build presence online. And for better or worse this has become a new way for younger generations of judging whether someone is cool or lame.
Online, aura is currency. And you generate it by doing things that feel like they were made to be clipped, memed, and passed around—but without trying too hard. Just look at the kid (his nickname is Reaper by the way, doesn’t get any better than that) dancing on a speeding boat while chaos unfolds behind him. He wasn’t trying to go viral. He was just being a vibe.
As Reed describes, what ends up happening is that creators with high aura get clipped way more than those with low aura. Even worse, those with the lowest aura do get clipped a lot, but for all the wrong reasons…
So, having a message or format is not enough. How it looks, feels, and flows matter as much, if not more.
HARVEST QUOTE
“Trust is the new oil”
- Doug Shapiro, explaining that the devaluing of attention will be replaced by trust in a recent post.
Two weeks ago, we highlighted the McKinsey report: The ‘attention equation’: Winning the right battles for consumer attention.
And now Doug takes us further down this idea that monetizing attention no longer matters, especially these days with AI coming in to “agentize” the internet, i.e. bots doing things online for humans vs. humans themselves. In that world, impressions and views become worthless.
As a result, audiences are way more likely to act when they trust the source. That means you, the creator/producer/writer/artist/studio.
Doug sums it up: just as data was the oil that fueled the attention economy, trust will be the oil that fuels the action economy.
How will you build trust?
See you next week…
Shanked is an interesting case study. They obviously put a lot of time and effort and money into it. Is the story/characters enough to bring people back? Time will tell.